we didn’t win the cold war by losing in Vietnam. We won the cold war by following George Kennan’s Containment grand strategy. A wag once called it winning with Blue Jeans, Rock & Roll, and Big Blonds. Whenever we strayed from containment we failed.
trying to the frame the question as one of heros versus cowards is childish at best and totalitarian at worst. Only totalitarian regimes have warrior cults.
trying to frame the question as left pacifists versus right militarists is also weak. Truman & Kennedy were both Democrats.
trying to make the argument ‘we need to fight them there otherwise they’ll invade us’ is impossible. We have been over there for 15 years and all it’s done it create lots more bad guys.
It takes real courage to realize blowing sh*t up in sandland is counterproductive. It takes real courage to conclude we’ve squandered trillions and countless lives. It takes real courage to accept throwing more blood and treasure out there isn’t making us safer, isn’t protecting anyone, and sure isn’t winning any hearts&minds.
"Containment?" Really? By the vooch theory of nouveau isolationism, world problems just fester away in their own sectors on the other side of the world and nobody has to ruffle a hair on their heads, the problem will just go away on its own.
Remember how well "containment" went with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Oh, that's right - we ended up in that anyway, didn't we? And everything was a whole lot bigger by the time we finally got into it, didn't it?
"Containment" might have worked back when long-range missiles hadn't been invented yet and our own home-grown traitors hadn't handed the Soviets nukes and we hadn't grown big enough or influential enough to need allies - but that changed, didn't it? "Containment" was what we were doing in Korea in the '50s and in Vietnam in the '60s. Nice to know that you think it was all unnecessary now, even though you supposedly espouse the Kenney doctrine.
Hiding our heads in the sand won't work anymore, probably never did. Remember Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates? Wars come to us, eventually. It's the price of being here.
You can spout all you want about how things will be dandy if we just stay at home but if you're at all rational, you know full well that if the Taliban are allowed to take over Afghanistan again and/or ISIS is allowed to go unchecked, more innocent people all over the world are going to die.
How are your opinions any different from the Left? They think everything will go away if the bad 'ol US just dries up and blows away. All of this is to excuse your own lack of gumption, isn't it?